Friday, January 20, 2017

Since Thursday was Pajama Day, we took a little time out of our busy schedule and did some reading in a cozy spot. After all, many of us like to get our jammies on and maybe do a little reading before we go to bed, right? We knew we couldn't go to bed, but we sure could (and did!) find a cozy spot to enjoy some great books.

On Wednesday morning, we had a special visitor at Northview. Dr. Jane Berenz, Superintendent of Schools for Independent School District 196, was at Northview and actually visited our classroom. She was very curious about our Morning Message, so we told her all about it. We even read it with her! She wondered about the red and blue markings on our message. We shared with her that we are learning about punctuation marks, so when we noticed one, we marked it with a red circle and shared what it meant when we see it in writing. The blue lines show the high frequency words that we recognized in the message. Dr. Berenz paid us a nice compliment. She told us that she could tell we were working hard in school and being our best selves. That made us feel very proud!

Thank you for visiting our class, Dr. Berenz. And thank you for all you do for our schools!

This was a short, but productive week in Kindergarten. I want to share with you some of the amazing writing that your kindergartners are doing. During our Writer's Workshop time, we continue to work on our skills as storytellers. We listen to the story teller and ask questions about their stories. Like Eric Carle, our writing begins with our idea or our thinking.

As writers, we take time to plan out our stories that will will write. We might talk with a friend about our idea. This helps us with our plan because our friend might ask some great questions that help us to think about details of our story. We count how many words are in our story. Then we get our tools…journals, pencils, crayons, alphabet charts and the word wall…and get to work!

Before we end our Writer's Workshop, we gather on the rug to share our writing. Sometimes we each share our writing by reading it to the class. Other times we may use the document camera and the SMART board to teach our classmates something we learned while writing today.

During our sharing time, we are respectful to each other by listening, asking questions and making comments about our friends' writing. We are so lucky that we can learn from each other in our classroom!

Monday, January 16, 2017

It was a very busy week in Kindergarten! We are loving reading our Eric Carle books!

We learned this week that Eric Carle does not have just one favorite color…he loves ALL colors. His favorite thing to do is blend colors. We were not exactly sure what he meant by this, so we tried blending some paint colors to see what would happen.

Very cool!

We also did some exploring with three dimensional shapes. We are specifically focusing on sphere, cube, cone and cylinder. We started by exploring the shapes, talking about what we noticed and writing down our thinking. Next week we will share out our wonderings about these shapes. We are also noticing these shapes around us in every day life. For example, in the lunchroom we noticed peas are shaped like spheres. Our breadsticks were shaped like cylinders, as were many of the containers used to serve our fruit and vegetables. Be sure to ask your kindergartner about these shapes and help them to notice them around your home.

For inside recess on Friday, we had a dance party in the gym! It was the BEST inside recess EVER!!! Many thanks to Mrs. Town, Mrs. Tavernier, Mr. Ball and Mr. Nelson for making this very fun event happen for us. These kindergartners can dance!

After the dance party, we worked up quite an appetite. We went to have lunch in the lunchroom.

Twinsies!

Mrs. Amy Countryman from the American Heart Association visited with us Friday afternoon to help us kick off our "Jump Rope for Heart" campaign for the 2017 school year. Please check your child's Friday Folders for more details on how you can participate with this worthwhile event.